Recorded 2007-02-12: Understanding the psychology behind how users relate to a product is the key to its lasting success. Users tend to anthropomorphize, or ascribe human personality traits to products they use. Products with long-term success have developers who recognize the identity and personality of the product they want to convey. They create integrity with the product and how their users will interact with it.
Tagged with “technology” (18)
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Kevin Kelly on technology evolving beyond us
Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired magazine, a former editor and publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, and one of the most compelling thinkers about technology today, talks about his new book, What Technology Wants. Make no mistake: the singularity is near. Kelly discusses the technium–a broad term that encompasses all of technology and culture–and its characteristics, including its autonomy and sense of bias, its interdependency, and how it evolves and self-replicates. He also talks about humans as the first domesticated animals; extropy and rising order; the inevitability of humans and complex technologies; the Amish as technology testers, selecters, and slow-adopters; the sentient technium; and technology as wilderness.
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The Internet at 40: Excavating the internet
Rodney Harrison, lecturer in heritage studies of the Open University, explains why he is doing archaeological research into Second Life, and what he has uncovered so far.
From http://podcast.open.ac.uk/pod/john-naughton-internet-40-special
Tagged with internet technology culture second life archeology open university
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The Digital Human: Chance
Aleks Krotoski explores whether the web is killing serendipity? Is it reducing our opportunity for chance encounters? Or is it possible to engineer these 'happy accidents' in the digital world?
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The Digital Human: Conviction
Aleks Krotoski looks belief in a digital world; from traditional religion to behaviour that looks remarkably like it from even the most rational looking of groups.
Tagged with bbc digital human internet web technology twitter:user=aleksk aleks krotoski
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The Digital Human: Intent
Aleks Krotoski ask do we really know what our technology is for and more intriguingly what it wants?
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The Digital Human: Tales
Aleks Krotoski looks at how story telling has changed in the digital age and whether it is has more in common with how we told tales in the past than we might think.
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The Digital Human: Memory
Alex Krotoski asks what the digital world tells us about ourselves. This week: Memory. How are digital devices changing our memories and our perception of intelligence?
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Bruce Sterling: The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole - The Long Now
One reason lots of people don’t want to think long term these days is because technology keeps accelerating so rapidly, we assume the world will become unrecognizable in a few years and then move on to unimaginable. Long-term thinking must be either impossible or irrelevant.
The commonest shorthand term for the runaway acceleration of technology is “the Singularity”—a concept introduced by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge in 1984. The term has been enthusiastically embraced by technology historians, futurists, extropians, and various trans-humanists and post-humanists, who have generated variants such as “the techno-rapture,” “the Spike,” etc.
It takes a science fiction writer to critique a science fiction idea.
Along with being one of America’s leading science fiction writers and technology journalists, Bruce Sterling is a celebrated speaker armed with lethal wit. His books include The Zenith Angle (just out), Hacker Crackdown, Holy Fire, Distraction, Mirrorshades (cyberpunk compendium), Schismatrix, The Difference Engine (with William Gibson), Tomorrow Now, and Islands in the Net.
The Seminar About Long-term Thinking on June 10-11 was Bruce Sterling examining “The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole.” He treated the subject of hyper-acceleration of technology as a genuine threat worth alleviating and as a fond fantasy worth cruel dismemberment.
http://longnow.org/seminars/02004/jun/11/the-singularity-your-future-as-a-black-hole/
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Admiral Shovel and the Toilet Roll
It begins to look as if we might have been wrong. All those predictions driving us forward throughout history have brought us finally to the unexpected realisation that the future is, suddenly, no longer what it used to be. Oops.
http://2012.dconstruct.org/conference/burke/
James Burke is a living legend. Or, as he put it, “No-one under the age of fifty has heard of me and everyone over the age of fifty thinks I’m dead.”
He is a science historian, an author, and a television presenter. But calling James Burke a television presenter is like calling Mozart a busker. His 1978 series Connections and his 1985 series The Day The Universe Changed remain unparalleled pieces of television brilliance covering the history of science and technology.
Before making those astounding shows, he worked on Tomorrow’s World and went on to become the BBC’s chief reporter on the Apollo Moon missions.
His books include The Pinball Effect, The Knowledge Web, Twin Tracks and Circles.
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